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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25829635">may there come abundant peace</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundercracker/pseuds/thundercracker'>thundercracker</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Adventure Zone (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aging, Alternate Universe - Tres Horny Girls, Death, Gen, Multi, Stand Alone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 03:02:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,396</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25829635</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundercracker/pseuds/thundercracker</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Julia Burnsides—hero, legend, lover—has a face creased with laugh lines that sags as proof of the time Wonderland took from her. She creates a home for her family. Her family creates a home for her.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Julia Burnsides/Magnus Burnsides, Julia Burnsides/The Director | Lucretia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>may there come abundant peace</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I've come to terms with the fact that I won't complete my THG story, so here is the epilogue for it that I wrote one midnight in 2018.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Julia Burnsides has lived a long life, considering. She’s a human, which would normally be the biggest factor against people like her, but she had been an adventurer, too. She had been a thief and a rogue even after her Fantasy Robin Hood burgling days were done. She had been to Wonderland, back when it stood, and that tended to cut lifespans by one hundred percent. She had faced the Hunger time and time again and, though she can’t say she survived it every time, she’s still alive.</p><p>Julia Burnsides is 73 years old, or 173, or 53, depending how you count it. She has a routine most days that would bore her—breakfast; physical therapy; lunch; water aerobics, which is really physical therapy part two; dinner and free time—except that she spends as much of that time as she can with a family of Birds that, for now, has come home to roost.  </p><p>Folks from the Bureau (of Benevolence, now) stop by when they can. Carey and Killian join in her water aerobics class sometimes and try to get everyone else to attempt sweet underwater flips; Julia tries the first few times but her inner ear isn’t what it used to be and her muscles are even less so, and the first time she succeeds her equilibrium is so messed up that she spends ten minutes clinging to the side of the pool, her friends apologizing all the while, feeling nauseous. </p><p>She has the best meals she’s had in ages every night, now, with Lup and Taako both stopping by to cook together for the whole IPRE crew. Like the old days, it’s loud, and rambunctious, and it’s a reprieve from the awkward moments when it’s just Julia and anyone but Lucretia, where she can sometimes feel them thinking about how weak and temporary human life is. Her now-soft face is wrinkled, she uses a wheelchair (though that she’s been using on and off since her chronic pain worsened decades ago), her arms shake when she grips things too hard. Hecuba has her on more than a few pills and tells her to drink tea four times a day. She gets it. She’s old. Lucretia is too, though she can still walk fine enough, and she doesn’t need at least five pills to function in the morning. But when dinner’s on, it’s her and the crew again, and everyone thinks about life. Well, Taako and Kravitz (who at this point is an honorary member of the crew along with Abbess Oriana, whose homeworld Hecuba had been resolute about visiting once the Day of Story and Song passed) and Barry and sometimes Lup always have death on the brain, all of them being in the Raven Queen’s employ, but… not hers, at least. </p><p>It’s a regular night a while after dinner, and everything is winding down when Julia dismisses herself and heads to bed. The house she lives in now is massive—she designed it herself, years ago, and constructed it with a little magical help from everyone else—and she and Lucretia share the biggest room. Everyone has their own, somehow. In the beginning it was uncommon for many people to visit all at once, as most of the crew was a <em> little </em>tired of dealing with each others’ shit in close quarters for a century. More and more, lately—because of Julia, and she knows it—it has been absolutely packed full. </p><p>Lup has a room on the main floor that she shares with Barry when he wants a reprieve from the Astral Plane, and Taako and Kravitz have the next room over for similar reasons. Davenport, in the room on the end, is the only Bird to room alone, though he never stayed for long until recently. Hecuba and Oriana share a bed on the main floor, because stairs are tough on Oriana now, and Hecuba complains about them regardless of if they actually bother her. The basement room that once belonged to Mavis and Mookie is used for Angus’s kids now, and the Roughridge-Highchurch siblings have moved into their own rooms in a hallway annexed to the living room. </p><p>On this evening, Julia tucks herself into bed. She wakes up, mouth dry, only three hours later. Lucretia’s forehead presses into her shoulder, and in the darkness it’s only Julia’s memory of every other night with her that she’s aware of the woman’s sleep-worried brows and deep, deep, beautiful, gentle, lovely wrinkles—she loves that about her face most of all; she thinks time has only added to her beauty, as if apologizing for how cruel it has been in every other regard. Lucretia laughs when she does so, every time, and so she makes sure to say it as frequently as possible, with affection, with earnesty, and with unabashed love.</p><p>It’s midnight, which means that there are still soft, carefully whispered discussions around the kitchen table—she can’t hear them from here, but she knows from experience. She pushes herself from bed and into a wheelchair enchanted just for her, with dozens of features that come in handy and dozens more she’s sure she’ll never use but is thankful for anyway. One of them muffles the sounds of the chair as she drops into it and makes her way to the kitchen. She starts to pick up the sounds of conversation when she rounds the corner and sees nearly everyone—all of the Birds, at least, save her sleeping wife—with their shoulders leaned over the table. Taako laughs at something loudly and everyone hushes him at once. Kravitz is here tonight, and puts an arm around his shoulder as if to comfort him from the scolding. The reaper’s eyes catch Julia’s and he waves, prompting a soft chorus of “Hey, Jules” and “Can’t sleep?” before the woman rolls to the refrigerator and replies, “Nah, just getting a popsicle.” She smiles at her medic of choice and says, “Doc says to keep hydrated, right?” as she pulls out a cube of frozen grape juice on a stick.</p><p>There are a few remarks that Julia mostly tunes out because it’s the middle of the night and she really just wanted the popsicle, good night everyone, before she returns to the bedroom and lies down next to her wife. She presses Lucretia’s hand to her lips and whispers a soft <em> goodnight, I love you </em>.</p><p>“Nothing for me?” whispers Lup, who had apparently followed her back. Lousy no good groggy hearing and lousy no good beautiful amazing best friend with elven grace. The human lets her lousy no good best friend side-hug her from her place in bed even though it’s an awkward angle and mumbles a gentle, “Goodnight, nerd. You just wanted to get away from Barry ‘cause he’s talking about the boring part of his work again.”</p><p>“Maybe so,” Lup hums with a grin. She lingers in the doorway before departing. “Night, babe. I hear the doc’s got you on that hamstring stretch you hate tomorrow, rest up.”</p><p> Julia makes a soft noise in reply and snuggles further into bed with her wife because she loves her like the earth loves the sun and she mumbles another tender<em> I love you </em> as she presses her chest into Lucretia’s back and snakes an arm around her side.</p><p>Sleep settles around her like a weighted blanket. Her eyes close.</p><p>When Julia opens her eyes, she is on an island. Kravitz is holding her hand. Her other hand holds the cane her husband made for her, ages ago, carved with daylilies, that she had hung on the wall when she switched to her wheelchair full-time. She can smell the faint scent of lavender on it still; a motion to examine it startles her when her hands do not shake or sag or fumble.</p><p>There is a house, here, and a man who turns to her.</p><p>He runs to her.</p><p>He picks her up, holds her to the sky, and looks up at her as if she’s the sun, and says with a booming voice laughing to choke back tears: </p><p>“Aw, Jules, I can’t believe my wife got married and you didn't even invite me to the wedding!”</p><p>Julia kisses her husband for the first time in thirty years and, caught in euphoria, distantly notes that you don’t need to break for air when you’re dead.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Some main points that come up in this: A large part of Hecuba's development was to be during the Stolen Century, especially discovering that she was a lesbian in love with Abbess Oriana. One of the chapters that actually got written was of Hecuba stealing the Light and giving it to the Hunger on purpose because she believed that the consumed planes could be saved, and she refused to sit back and let Oriana die. </p><p>Another chapter that was written was about Taako being dead but being such a pest in the Astral Plane that he managed to catch Kravitz's attention and tell him to find out if his sister was alright, and that also hey, the planar system may or may not be in peril.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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